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Ken Braun: USA World Cup team is a threat to world peace

Soccer.jpg

Germany's Thomas Mueller is tripped by United States' Omar Gonzalez during the group G World Cup soccer match between the USA and Germany at the Arena Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, Thursday, June 26, 2014.
((AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan))

The USA Soccer team has advanced to the Sweet 16, or “Round of 16” or whatever they choose to call the last 16 teams left on Earth competing to win the World Cup of Kickball in Brazil. We’ll next play Belgium, a nation 1/27th our size that nonetheless will care about this contest ten times as much, despite a best-ever finish of 4th, versus our best-ever finish of 3rd.

Forgive me if I misstate the kickball history, as I’m relying upon Wikipedia and clearly no actual knowledge of the game itself. Any errors demonstrate that Wiki doesn’t much care for it either.

As a child growing up in the late 70s and early 80s, soccer was relentlessly inflicted during gym class, more so than hoops, football or floor hockey - the games my friends and I really wanted to play. We were informed that appreciation of world kickball, like a thorough understanding of the metric system, would be indispensable for functioning in the cultural and economic landscape of our adult years. By 2014, the 46-year old me was supposed to be purchasing gasoline by the liter and obsessed with the world’s “more evolved” form of “football,” rather than the barbaric celebration of collisions enjoyed solely by North American football fans.

Yet even back then I couldn’t help but notice this supposedly more evolved game - unlike just about every other competitive sport one can imagine - doesn’t require an opposable thumb. If this is “evolution,” then Rick Santorum is a biology professor.

I have learned we’re unlikely to bring back the trophy from Brazil this year. That’s probably a good thing, because the world would hate us if we did.

A star player from a victorious European, South American, Central American, Asian or African team would never need to buy his own drinks again at many taverns in his homeland. Likewise, in America we’ll never forget the names of our World Cup superstars if they bring home a championship. But that’s only because just a tiny few of us will ever learn their names in the first place.

In other nations even losers get noticed. The highly rated Colombian team was upset by the underdog Americans in 1994 when a Colombian defender scored against his own team. Few Americans even remember the incident, let alone the names of the victorious players, but in Colombia that hapless defender was swiftly murdered upon his return home. We don’t want something like that on our conscience again.

Many of the best young athletes in most of the world’s nations grow up with soccer as a top-tier ambition, but not here. No nation remotely commands our combination of size and wealth, but we drop the biggest coin training kids to play games the rest of the world ignores.

This too is a good thing. If this stupendously wealthy nation of more than 300 million people spent its biggest boatloads of sporting cash training our best young talents to kick balls around, then we’d likely win way more than our share of these World Cup thingys. Given murders in Colombia and soccer hooligan riots in Europe, it seems likely an American soccer superpower would destabilize world peace. So obsessing over college football instead is diplomacy at its finest.

Unfortunately, World Cup organizers make a huge mistake putting the event head-to-head against the American baseball season, which is even more stultifyingly somnolent than soccer. If you want to make us care about a sport, give us a competitive team playing at a time when nothing else is worth watching. It’s even got me paying attention.

Ken Braun was a legislative aide for a Republican lawmaker in the Michigan House and worked for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. He has assisted in a start-up effort to encourage employers to provide economic education to employees, and is currently the director of policy for InformationStation.org. His employer is not responsible for what he says here, on Facebook, or Twitter ... or in Spartan Stadium on game days.